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Do virtual catwalks remove the limitations of conventional models or the humanity? December was an important month for the Iranian fashion scene as the city of Tehran played hosted to an augmented reality fashion show; complete with digital models and a virtual catwalk. Created with the support of Lotus, Iran’s first fashion & art magazine,

A number of VR developers are quietly working on projects for this year and beyond, while 2018 saw 17,000 standalone $200 Oculus Go VR headsets purchased by Walmart and deployed at stores everywhere to train employees.

Also in 2018, the United States Army awarded Microsoft a contract worth nearly half a billion dollars to augment U.S. service members with enhancements in “lethality, mobility, and situational awareness” derived from the $3,000 HoloLens AR standalone headset.

Microsoft’s HoloLens as seen on the International Space Station.

Magic Leap One

Magic Leap reportedly lost out on the contract won by Microsoft.

The company launched its $2,300 Magic Leap One AR headset development kit in August after revealing earlier in the year it passed $2 billion in total investment, with a huge amount from Saudi Arabia. Magic Leap’s CEO Rony Abovitz suggested in our first face-to-face interview (you can read the entire transcript) that “big” players like Microsoft and Apple are going to spend ten times that amount investing in this technology. We don’t follow the logic, but he claimed those larger efforts will be “much more inefficient” compared to Magic Leap.

Magic Leap One first shipped to developers in August 2018.

China

U.S.-based companies like Facebook and Valve are partnering with China-based counterparts to either tap the vast market in that country or manufacture hardware. For example, Facebook shipped Oculus Go in the United States and elsewhere around the world as the identical Mi VR standalone from manufacturing partner Xiaomi shipped in China without the Oculus Store. Valve, meanwhile, partnered with a Chinese company to launch a version of its Steam PC games store tailored specifically for the Chinese market.

HTC’s Alvin Wang Graylin on the runway with a VR headset.

HTC Vive Focus

HTC launched its Vive Focus VR standalone first in China in 2018. The company also launched the Vive Pro and the Vive Wireless Adapter and these two very expensive pieces of PC VR hardware provided some of best VR experiences available in 2018, but only when they work right.

Late in year, photos of a VR headset leaked featuring “Valve” on its exposed circuit board. If this finished head-mounted display is paired with the “Knuckles” controllers, and one or more Valve games, it could be exactly what the PC VR market needs for renewed growth.

Valve’s leaked head-mounted display.

The leak came as both HTC and Google started showing the Vive Focus and Mirage Solo standalone VR headsets featuring a pair of “6DoF” point-and-reach hand controllers. While we haven’t gone hands-on with these kits yet, we did try the upcoming $400 Oculus Quest extensively and came away pretty impressed by its tracking performance in highly controlled demos at Facebook’s Oculus Connect VR developers conference.

Transitional Year For Mixed Reality Technology

Overall in 2018, VR developed on private and public tracks.

While some companies shipped standalone headsets publicly, they did so with limited 3DoF pointer-only hand controllers which handcuffed many developers and buyers. Privately, some of these same companies secured new partnerships and worked on more compelling

VR developer Turbo Button released an interface for multiplatform VR development in Unity. Turbo Button is the developer behind Floor Plan, Along Together, and the official Adventure Time VR game.

The studio used the interface for their two most recent titles, Floor Plan & Along Together. But TButt has also been used by other studios, most notably by Tender Claws for their hit Virtual Virtual Reality.

Turbo Button additionally stated that the interface already supports Oculus Quest, and that several in development Quest titles are already using it.

The issue TButt aims to solve is the fragmentation that exists between VR platforms SDKs of today. Without an interface like this developers have to rewrite code to achieve the same result on different VR platforms. TButt abstracts input, performance settings, tracking data, and more.

Input (handling controllers) is a core focus of the interface. Input is the most significant difference between VR platforms today. TButt handles everything from basic 3DoF laser pointers to dual 6DoF controllers. A useful feature is that it allows for emulating a 3DoF controller in the Unity editor for more rapid development than pushing a full build to a standalone headset.

TButt supports the Oculus, SteamVR, Windows MR and DayDream platforms. Crucially, it also complies with the publishing requirements of the default stores for each platform, meaning it can be used to ship real games.

TButt is free and open source, leveraging the popular MIT Licence. This lets any developer use and modify it even for commercial projects. It’s encouraging to see the spirit of co-operation in the VR development community- hopefully it lives on as VR enters the mainstream market in coming years.

Exploring the massive supernova remnant of a 400-year-old star has never been easier. A team of researchers lead by Kimberly Kowal Arcand of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) and the Center for Computation and Visualization at Brown University have begun development of a one-of-a-kind VR experience that utilizes data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory

The 14-room facility features vibrating floors, haptic peripherals, and artificial wind. Location-based VR made serious headway in Malaysia this month as immersive entertainment specialists VAR Live launched what is now the largest VR-based theme park in the entire country. Located inside the MyTOWN Shopping Centre in Kuala Lumpur, VAR Live Malaysia offers 13 of their

Researchers at the University of Cambridge developed a virtual reality app which vizualizes cancerous tumours. The project was part of the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute (CRUK) Grand Challenge Awards.

The tumour to be analyzed is cut into wafer thin slices which are stained with markers. These slices are digitally scanned and the system constructs a 3D representation of the tumour from these scans. The model can be magnified and rotated in a virtual lab.

Graphic from Cancer Research UK

The software features networking allowing researchers to view the tumour together, even remotely over the internet. Each user is represented with a basic 3D avatar and can communicate with their voice. This kind of direct remote collaboration was much more difficult with existing technologies.

In the past researchers relied on 2D scans or basic 3D models on a monitor. Neither provides the easy level of understanding of depth that VR does. Seeing tumours in this way may allow researchers to more easily identify patterns in how they spread throughout tissue.